[sdiy] presets on a modular

[Richard Wentk]

At 02:43 12/11/2004 -0800, Don Tillman wrote:
>(Should I get involved in this conversation?  With my crazy opinions,
>technical background, and zen attitude?  What the hell...)
>
>Harumph... this is going nowhere.  I'll claim that preset schemes,
>such as the ones described so far in this thread, are fundamentally
>doomed for three reasons:
>
>The first is that they're way too complex.  Whether you measure that
>by the parts count, by the cost, by the panel space, or by the time
>spent building it, the value of the patching circuitry comes in at
>several times the circuitry being patched.  Or more.  At that point it
>makes much more sense to just spend the resources on more modules and
>dedicate some modules to some patches.

No it doesn't. As I said, professional musicians *want* patching. They've 
always wanted. On big modulars they put up with not having it, but if it 
were available they'd use it, and they'd pay to buy it.

>The second is that the preset schemes suffer from a bad user
>interface.  Remember, you're building a Musical Instrument (capital M,
>capital I), and for that a bad user interface is unacceptable.

I don't think a cord-free interface is any worse than one that relies on 
patch cords. Cords get tangled up, broken, lost, and if you build a monster 
UberPatch of Doom half the time you can't see what the panel settings are 
anyway. Hell, half the time you can't make sense of a complex patch without 
tracing it through either.

The only reason people use patch cords is tradition. But patch cords are 
1920s technology. It should be possible to create something better now.

>And third, the patching schemes are all based on the awful patching
>model found on any modern computer-in-a-plastic-box keyboard, where
>arbitrary sounds are selected by a binary number.  No real Musical
>Instruments use that preset model.

I don't get your point here. It's an index card model, with one number per 
sound, and it makes perfect intutive sense. If you want to you can name the 
patch, and display it a huge LED matrix display. With a little extra work 
you can group patches by type and subtype, build a patch data base, add 
randomisation features, make it selectable by text message from a 
cellphone, and generally whatever.

Binary is non-issue. As soon as you *can* patch, you can extend the 
interface however you want to.

>Instead of forcing a bad preset model on an analog modular synth, I
>think it would be better to develop a new preset model that's more
>appropriate to the instrument.

Such as...?

Richard